White Knight Chronicles is competent and solid without ever being beautiful or, you'll find yourself realising with a scratch of the head 15 hours in, particularly enjoyable. [Apr 2010, p.99]

Comparisons with "Halo" are inevitable. Unfortunately, Fire Warrior shows how developers can steal elements from superior games, while fundamentally misunderstanding why they worked so well in the first place. [Nov 2003, p.101]

Where it goes wrong is the finale. Almost every major choice is proven irrelevant, and barely any plot threads resolve. [Jan 2016, p.118]

To enjoy EDF, you've always needed to be willing to compromise. Those days are gone. It's never felt so fluid. [Feb 2016, p.116]

Warrior Kings: Battles mixes and matches familiar mechanisms in interesting ways, but it proves that balancing real wargaming with resource-based empire building is as precarious a task as ever. [June 2003, p.105]

Where other games treat romance as a reward or an optional curio, Airport dares to put love at its centre. For that, at least, it deserves praise. And a treat. Perhaps even a belly rub, too. [Issue#360, p.123]

Its stripped-back beat-matching will leave you tapping your foot - but out of impatience as much as approval of its grimy dubstep. [Feb 2011, p.103]

As chaotic and unrefined as it is, however, it motors on with a definite sense of purpose and provides a solid sense of fulfilment, if not necessarily one of accomplishment. [Christmas 2005, p.110]

IGI2 straddles the same uneasy middle ground between (pseudo) realism and playability as its predecessor, and consequently strays from the realm of the enjoyable to that of the tedious far more often than is desirable. [March 2003, p.96]

A more novel addition is a crafting system lets you convert items you find into items and potions, but it functions more like a secondary currency than an alchemical minigame. There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Mini Ninjas, but nor is there a reason to give up on genre highlights like Punch Quest and Jetpack Joyride.

Deformable landscapes, multiple level routes, context sensitive controls, impeccable camera control, inventive boss level. Flipnic would be one hell of an adventure game. [Dec 2003, p.99]

Scars Above bears all the hallmarks of a game that was overscoped and steadily scaled back as development went on, with many of its more intriguing ideas sidelined as the story progresses. [Issue#383, p.117]

The joy of Pirates of the Caribbean is to be found in the variety of the elements delivered - sword fights and canon battles happily sit alongside contraband trade route management. But ultimately none offer a tremendous amount of depth. [Nov 2003, p.107]

Despite its problems, and they're not insignificant, Ancestors has an unusual magnetism. [Issue#337, p.116]

Free-to-play works when you earn the trust of your players over time, but RedLynx instead prods you at every opportunity to remind you that you haven’t paid for your game yet. Even so, once dredged from beneath the cloying mass of microtransactions that suffocate it, Trials Frontier isn’t a bad game as such. It is, however, a very bad Trials game.

The original HOTD: Overkill is no holy grail of the genre, but it did spice up the ailing niche with some eccentricity and zany thrills. To see it massacred in this way is a shame both for the series and for iOS newcomers whose first taste of this most guilty of pleasures will be a sour one.

Sluggish loading times tend to cause frame-rate hiccups at the outset of a multiplayer game, and such issues are exacerbated in the busier environments with a full complement of players.

Rarely does dying feel like the player's fault and, in typical "Sonic Adventure" fashion, the best bits are when you find that the majority of control has been taken away from you, and you're flung around the world at escape velocity. [Mar 2004, p.105]

For now, SimCity is good for the reasons it’s always been good, and bad for reasons old and new. And yes, we wish we could play it on the train. But after spending two weeks as mayor of a series of teeming pocket metropolises, we’re still ready to spend more.

But the lack of crispness in the controls undermines everything else here, and too often does the same to the player.

You could never accuse Strange Scaffold of resting on its laurels. [Issue#367, p.115]

The concept at the core of Yosumin Live is robust, but it fails to hold up under extended play. Either Square Enix has happened upon a brilliant mechanic that has yet to fully bloom or one that it has been unable to sustain. The scant progression Yosumin has made in its transition from webgame to XBLA release indicates that perhaps it is the latter.

The game effectively highlights the difference between a sandbox which facilitates player experimentation, and a game environment that only allows prescribed actions. [May 2009, p.95]

Strafe styles itself as both "the future of videogames" and "the most action-packed game of 1996", and there's a ring of truth to both gags. In folding together and drilling into layers of FPS convention, Pixel Titans has created a game that is at once sentimental and sharply contemporary. It doesn't so much take us back to '96 as transport '96 into the present, picking up threads left by Doom and Quake and weaving its own tapestry out of them, every time you play. [July 2017, p.116]

Many titles are likened to "Devil May Cry," but Van Helsing appropriates that game's structure with such brazen thoroughness that it might be seen as this generation's Great Giana Sisters. [July 2004, p.108]

For all its faults, there's every chance The Town of Light could end up getting under your[ skin]. [April 2016, p.112]

There’s a nugget of brilliance at the heart of Micro Machines that’s too simple and solid to crush, it’s true, but the laughable track editor, fussy interface and baffling load times certainly don’t justify this release. [Aug 2006, p.93]

Tiberian Twilight finds the series at a crossroads, with its glory days gone and its future uncertain. [May 2010, p.100]